Electronics manufacturing facilities must maintain process chambers at appropriate operating pressures to maximize yield, throughput, uniformity, kit life, and up time. Additionally, electronics manufacturing facilities are significantly impacted by unscheduled down time, yield loss, and equipment damage related to line clogging, line leaks, reactive chemical incidents due to line leaks, and pump wear out. In current manufacturing facilities, inspection and maintenance of processing equipment related to the aforementioned problems are performed manually after such a problem occurs.
For example, conventional best-known methods (BKM) for leak checking of lines, line inspection for clogging, and pump capacity testing (running pump capacity curves between and after regularly scheduled preventative maintenance checks) take time, are difficult, require highly skilled labor, and are frequently not employed unless a pattern of significant incidents have occurred.
Solar and light emitting diode (LED) facilities are particularly impacted by these issues because difficulty of existing BKM procedures in finding leaks, defining the line clogging, and or pump wear time line out between normally scheduled replacement or inspection schedules.
Thus, the inventors have provided an improved monitoring and control systems for use in vacuum processing equipment.